We must be realistic, one will never get lots of sub-bass out of a cabinet this size.
Same with Kii 7. When Bruno Putzeys demonstrated this at the Dutch Audio Event, he used the track “Chunky” from Bruno Mars. This track sounds like it has a lot of bass, tight and punchy out of the Kii Seven (same size as the radiant approximately) and it seems to sound great in the bass department.
But when you play this track on a full range system with sub-bass, you will discover that there is also sub-bass in this song and the bass sounds more nuanced and articulated in comparison. Much more impressive and powerful. Furthermore, you can really feel it.
But then again, dor the size, measurements show it delivers clean and relatively undistorted bass and 40hz might be enough for the masses.
Absolutely. In the end - no matter if you go passive or active, equalized or not - bass needs displacement volume. Period. And even a long stroke 6.5" driver can only deliver so much of it.
Purifi and Radiant Acoustics are fully aware, of course. Neither the drivers nor the speaker have been advertised to deliver the lowest bass ever.
Very well put. Having never heard the Purifi drivers before, it was easy to imagine some secret sauce to give them crazy extension! Instead, they are very well behaved inside their spec-range, and then well integrated to drop off quickly and not play what they can't.
That's true, but there's more to it. As
@Vergiliusma already mentioned, the real deal with Purifi drivers is how linear they are with respect to power and excursion. Push them as much as you want (within their mechanical limits) and their characteristics will stay the same, be it suspension stiffness, driving force, voice coil inductance and counter EMF. The cone moving outwards as much as moving inwards. This is why not only THD is very low but also inter-modulation distortion.
Note that the crossover frequency is around 2.4 kHz. This might have somewhat been the norm 30 or 35 years ago, but speakers back then
did really suffer from a rough directivity index and midrange IMD nobody talked much about (because it was hard to measure and impossible to mitigate for everybody unless you went with a 3-way design, introducing other problems). One could really say: As soon as you see the cone moving, sound starts to get ******. This is no longer true with the Purifi woofers.
I'd still like to know what's been causing this strange distortion peak in Erin's measurements. It doesn't look like it should be there, even if he says he didn't recognize it during his listening sessions.
